SERIES: Part Three of a Four-Part Article

Is there a way to build a better mousetrap? Of course there is. If done, would anyone want to buy a better mousetrap or are people so complacent that they don’t really want to improve their performance?

Businesses have evolved into using very similar methods for immersing new players to a team and ensuring that all of the government mandates are met. This has detracted from real performance, however, causing it to become the third or fourth most important factor on the list of priorities.

One simple way to improve the performance of every player in an organization is to rebuild the application that one traditionally fills out when applying for a position. Convert this application that one would fill-out away from the traditional “Position Application” and to a “Performance Application” and share this new insight with everyone vested in these results – everyone should know the performance abilities of every player on a team. Once this knowledge is shared, everyone can be held accountable for drawing upon one another – in an appropriate strategic and tactical manner – for peak performance!

Cultivating performance greatness from the beginning can be drawn from the valuable information that one would give you if asked the right questions. Consider:

Work – All applicable previous work positions and additional questions as to how any of this data would be an added value to you and the present team. Allow them sell themselves and illustrate how they can impact the team, if allowed to join, by aiding it in increasing revenue, saving revenue and/or increasing productivity.

As a tactical leader, to cultivate peak performance and coach greater performance on a daily basis, you actually will not be drawing upon this information for someone to perform, but rather:

Practical Education – Solicit from individuals the last twenty or forty seminars, symposiums, home study courses completed or workshops they have attended. Ask them to recap how at least five to ten of these can be immediately drawn from for utilization in your environment. Solicit how these ongoing educational exposures can actually have more immediate and lasting positive performance impact upon you and the team than any traditional formal degree!

Certifications – Solicit the totality of any life certifications they have attained and ways others on your team could glean value from them. Inquire how those could be drawn upon and in what ways they could serve as the team’s subject matter expert in those domains, thus leading others’ performances to greatness!

Must Have – Also solicit on this performance application by category prompts all the necessary skill abilities a person must have to even rise to the state of peak performance in any specific functioning area. You know what people must have to be true performers and what the functionality traits are that one must possess to be successful; don’t keep those a secret. Rather, enter them into this application template.

In essence, consider expanding the traditional second data collection field of education into both the “Formal” and now the “Practical” educational requirements or ideal sought capabilities. Most organizations DO NOT COLLECT this data presently!

Once this data is collected, don’t keep it a secret. Broadcast these performance insights both horizontally within your business area and vertically to leaders to have as strategic access opportunities.

Performance success does not just happen. Success leaves clues, and the purpose of this “Performance Application” is solicit exactly that – performance showcase snapshots from the past that can be extrapolated for the future.

As a leader, a testament to your legacy is your ability to have the presence of mind to know how to have an influential footprint on the group dynamics of your team, while not being physically visible.

As the great motivational sales speaker Zig Ziglar made the idea famous decades ago, to motivate an individual, you must realize that individuals listen to others as if they were listening to a radio station frequency. And as all radio stations have identifying call letters for their appropriate frequency, individuals own the call letter WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Each person listens internally and determines his or her level of buy-in based upon processing over the internal frequency of WIIIFM (get your copy of ways to motivate individuals in the powerful book, What’s In It For Me, at www.JeffreyMagee.com/library.asp today). Thus we must carefully craft the message individuals will receive.

In designing appropriate tactical ways to motivate the groups, teams and departments you lead, you must recognize that while individuals may listen to WIIFM, groups do not. Groups listen to WIIFU or What’s In It For Us!

As a tactical leader, your ability to play to this frequency is essential for group motivation. To craft an endless list of tactical ways to motivate groups and create a sense of “oneness” from a collection of individuals brought together as a group, start by eliminating all micro management endeavors that serve as team debilitators.

Consider these tactical ways to bring about peak performance from your team:

Team Mission Statement – Make sure that all the members of your team actually know what the purpose of the team is. A mission statement serves as a road map for daily individual behaviors to ensure that the cumulative net effect of everyone is consistent with where you, as the leader, need everyone to be going. This mission statement will serve as a guidepost in your absence for individuals to gage their decisions and actions and ensure that, as a team, they are empowered and working toward the same goal.

The most recent edition of PEFORMANCE Magazine (subscribe at www.JeffreyMagee.com) indicates from a recent Franklin Covey study of U.S. Workers that 81 percent of respondents revealed they “don’t understand” the goals of their organization!

Performance Assessments – Continually and regularly deploy action-oriented, solution-focused, performance improvement-directed personnel assessments within your team. Do so from a 360 degree feedback loop perspective. By creating an environment conducive for everyone to provide constructive, healthy feedback for continued improvement in everything one does, the team will have a greater sense of “oneness” and purpose for being in endeavors together.

Group Think Exchanges – Create a depository of ideas to which individuals can submit productivity and efficiency ideas and from which they can withdraw. Find ways to globally capture “best practices” within your organization to ensure maximum effectiveness and reduced redundancies and allow for the free flow of ideas and synergies from which one can regularly grow outward.

Incentive Idea Sharing – Make the sharing of ideas such a celebrated and rewarding cause that individuals are excited and evolve into constant success- generating machines. Place a reasonable yet powerful bounty on ideas to be submitted and communicated upwards, and that when accepted or implemented, the individual(s) that submitted the ideas are rewarded handsomely!

A powerful bounty becomes a compelling draw for ideas to be submitted. Consider even a revenue or profit-sharing bounty. Provide a payback of as much as ten percent cash back, stock from the net savings or profitability from any submitted idea.

Intrinsic Motivators – Sociology has found that in studying group dynamics, the more individuals are allowed to do the following six action items, the greater their level of enthusiasm becomes and the more they tend to assume ownership roles. Consider your ability in the following: Choice in work assignments; Decision in to how to execute; Creative approaches; Feedback continually, fairly and solution- oriented to behaviors; Challenging work assignments; and Competitive climate.

As a leader, how you tactically engage your team and strategically set them up for success will directly influence how the individuals gel together and enthusiastically move forward with one another.

Executive Summary: Blending systems and people for increased organizational success

Each day, managerial-leadership effectiveness starts from a perspective not taught in America’s leading business schools. A leader’s first objective is to create an environment conducive for success. This starts by recognizing that one’s attitude influences all actions and reactions one displays in business each day!

An effective leader has a heightened awareness of which obstacles impede success and accepts action plans to remove or eliminate them from a business environment.

American management icon Peter Drucker has long asserted that organizational success and effectiveness rest on two primary domains: systems and people. To attain a higher level of success, a leader should recognize that anything that can be done to improve the efficiencies of systems must be done. Leaders should also recognize what can be done to enhance the performance of people on the team.

The processes of conditioning both for success can be blended together through simple tactical action plans. Consider:

Incentive Wealth Sharing Program – Institute a program with real incentives to invite all members of an organization to share suggestions on how to either save money, make money or increase productivity. Offer a 10 percent incentive for anything that is accepted, acted upon or implemented and that can be measured!

Remove Frustration Items – Recognize the policies, procedures, programs, etc. that you would have complained about before you evolved into a leadership role. Now that you are in management, assume the role of authority, responsibility and accountability and review the relevance of them. If you cannot make a powerful case for maintaining them, remove them!

Environmental Plus-It – Determine all of the environmental resources, materials, equipment and trappings that work to create positive attitudes among individuals. When and where possible, add them to “plus” the environment!

Limit Exposure – Increase your awareness of the things and people that push people’s “hot buttons” and limit the exposure of your peak performers to these negative influences. Surround them with positive and encouraging factors that further condition the forward momentum of an organization.

Celebrate Regularly – Psychology reveals that our mind needs to see fulfillment and accomplishment for expanded energies, and when it does, it refuels itself. When individuals work on activities that do not generate immediate measurable results, people can become bored, burned out, complacent and disassociated. As a leader, it is your job to ensure that individuals and teams are acknowledged regularly for successes and that displays of celebration are allowed and encouraged!

Individualize Appropriately – Allow individuals to individualize their work space, within appropriate perimeters, with comfort items that feed their psychology a sense of belonging, ownership and pride. People will have a greater level of buy-in to their work space, work responsibilities and overall organization.

Creating environments for success and prosperity is directly linked to how a leader conditions an environment to be conducive for the daily planting of success seeds and the regular harvest of achievement.

Is there a way to build a better mousetrap? Of course there is. If done, would anyone want to buy a better mousetrap or are people so complacent that they don’t really want to improve their performance?

Businesses have evolved into using very similar methods for immersing new players to a team and ensuring that all of the government mandates are met. This has detracted from real performance, however, causing it to become the third or fourth most important factor on the list of priorities.

One simple way to improve the performance of every player in an organization is to rebuild the application that one traditionally fills out when applying for a position. Convert this application that one would fill-out away from the traditional “Position Application” and to a “Performance Application” and share this new insight with everyone vested in these results – everyone should know the performance abilities of every player on a team. Once this knowledge is shared, everyone can be held accountable for drawing upon one another – in an appropriate strategic and tactical manner – for peak performance!

Cultivating performance greatness from the beginning can be drawn from the valuable information that one would give you if asked the right questions. Consider:

Work – All applicable previous work positions and additional questions as to how any of this data would be an added value to you and the present team. Allow them sell themselves and illustrate how they can impact the team, if allowed to join, by aiding it in increasing revenue, saving revenue and/or increasing productivity.

As a tactical leader, to cultivate peak performance and coach greater performance on a daily basis, you actually will not be drawing upon this information for someone to perform, but rather:

Practical Education – Solicit from individuals the last twenty or forty seminars, symposiums, home study courses completed or workshops they have attended. Ask them to recap how at least five to ten of these can be immediately drawn from for utilization in your environment. Solicit how these ongoing educational exposures can actually have more immediate and lasting positive performance impact upon you and the team than any traditional formal degree!

Certifications – Solicit the totality of any life certifications they have attained and ways others on your team could glean value from them. Inquire how those could be drawn upon and in what ways they could serve as the team’s subject matter expert in those domains, thus leading others’ performances to greatness!

Must Have – Also solicit on this performance application by category prompts all the necessary skill abilities a person must have to even rise to the state of peak performance in any specific functioning area. You know what people must have to be true performers and what the functionality traits are that one must possess to be successful; don’t keep those a secret. Rather, enter them into this application template.

In essence, consider expanding the traditional second data collection field of education into both the “Formal” and now the “Practical” educational requirements or ideal sought capabilities. Most organizations DO NOT COLLECT this data presently!

Once this data is collected, don’t keep it a secret. Broadcast these performance insights both horizontally within your business area and vertically to leaders to have as strategic access opportunities.

Performance success does not just happen. Success leaves clues, and the purpose of this “Performance Application” is solicit exactly that – performance showcase snapshots from the past that can be extrapolated for the future.

As a leader, a testament to your legacy is your ability to have the presence of mind to know how to have an influential footprint on the group dynamics of your team, while not being physically visible.

As the great motivational sales speaker Zig Ziglar made the idea famous decades ago, to motivate an individual, you must realize that individuals listen to others as if they were listening to a radio station frequency. And as all radio stations have identifying call letters for their appropriate frequency, individuals own the call letter WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Each person listens internally and determines his or her level of buy-in based upon processing over the internal frequency of WIIIFM (get your copy of ways to motivate individuals in the powerful book, What’s In It For Me, at www.JeffreyMagee.com/library.asp today). Thus we must carefully craft the message individuals will receive.

In designing appropriate tactical ways to motivate the groups, teams and departments you lead, you must recognize that while individuals may listen to WIIFM, groups do not. Groups listen to WIIFU or What’s In It For Us!

As a tactical leader, your ability to play to this frequency is essential for group motivation. To craft an endless list of tactical ways to motivate groups and create a sense of “oneness” from a collection of individuals brought together as a group, start by eliminating all micro management endeavors that serve as team debilitators.

Consider these tactical ways to bring about peak performance from your team:

Team Mission Statement – Make sure that all the members of your team actually know what the purpose of the team is. A mission statement serves as a road map for daily individual behaviors to ensure that the cumulative net effect of everyone is consistent with where you, as the leader, need everyone to be going. This mission statement will serve as a guidepost in your absence for individuals to gage their decisions and actions and ensure that, as a team, they are empowered and working toward the same goal.

The most recent edition of PEFORMANCE Magazine (subscribe at www.JeffreyMagee.com) indicates from a recent Franklin Covey study of U.S. Workers that 81 percent of respondents revealed they “don’t understand” the goals of their organization!

Performance Assessments – Continually and regularly deploy action-oriented, solution-focused, performance improvement-directed personnel assessments within your team. Do so from a 360 degree feedback loop perspective. By creating an environment conducive for everyone to provide constructive, healthy feedback for continued improvement in everything one does, the team will have a greater sense of “oneness” and purpose for being in endeavors together.

Group Think Exchanges – Create a depository of ideas to which individuals can submit productivity and efficiency ideas and from which they can withdraw. Find ways to globally capture “best practices” within your organization to ensure maximum effectiveness and reduced redundancies and allow for the free flow of ideas and synergies from which one can regularly grow outward.

Incentive Idea Sharing – Make the sharing of ideas such a celebrated and rewarding cause that individuals are excited and evolve into constant success- generating machines. Place a reasonable yet powerful bounty on ideas to be submitted and communicated upwards, and that when accepted or implemented, the individual(s) that submitted the ideas are rewarded handsomely!

A powerful bounty becomes a compelling draw for ideas to be submitted. Consider even a revenue or profit-sharing bounty. Provide a payback of as much as ten percent cash back, stock from the net savings or profitability from any submitted idea.

Intrinsic Motivators – Sociology has found that in studying group dynamics, the more individuals are allowed to do the following six action items, the greater their level of enthusiasm becomes and the more they tend to assume ownership roles. Consider your ability in the following: Choice in work assignments; Decision in to how to execute; Creative approaches; Feedback continually, fairly and solution- oriented to behaviors; Challenging work assignments; and Competitive climate.

As a leader, how you tactically engage your team and strategically set them up for success will directly influence how the individuals gel together and enthusiastically move forward with one another.

Executive Summary: Blending systems and people for increased organizational success

Each day, managerial-leadership effectiveness starts from a perspective not taught in America’s leading business schools. A leader’s first objective is to create an environment conducive for success. This starts by recognizing that one’s attitude influences all actions and reactions one displays in business each day!

An effective leader has a heightened awareness of which obstacles impede success and accepts action plans to remove or eliminate them from a business environment.

American management icon Peter Drucker has long asserted that organizational success and effectiveness rest on two primary domains: systems and people. To attain a higher level of success, a leader should recognize that anything that can be done to improve the efficiencies of systems must be done. Leaders should also recognize what can be done to enhance the performance of people on the team.

The processes of conditioning both for success can be blended together through simple tactical action plans. Consider:

Incentive Wealth Sharing Program – Institute a program with real incentives to invite all members of an organization to share suggestions on how to either save money, make money or increase productivity. Offer a 10 percent incentive for anything that is accepted, acted upon or implemented and that can be measured!

Remove Frustration Items – Recognize the policies, procedures, programs, etc. that you would have complained about before you evolved into a leadership role. Now that you are in management, assume the role of authority, responsibility and accountability and review the relevance of them. If you cannot make a powerful case for maintaining them, remove them!

Environmental Plus-It – Determine all of the environmental resources, materials, equipment and trappings that work to create positive attitudes among individuals. When and where possible, add them to “plus” the environment!

Limit Exposure – Increase your awareness of the things and people that push people’s “hot buttons” and limit the exposure of your peak performers to these negative influences. Surround them with positive and encouraging factors that further condition the forward momentum of an organization.

Celebrate Regularly – Psychology reveals that our mind needs to see fulfillment and accomplishment for expanded energies, and when it does, it refuels itself. When individuals work on activities that do not generate immediate measurable results, people can become bored, burned out, complacent and disassociated. As a leader, it is your job to ensure that individuals and teams are acknowledged regularly for successes and that displays of celebration are allowed and encouraged!

Individualize Appropriately – Allow individuals to individualize their work space, within appropriate perimeters, with comfort items that feed their psychology a sense of belonging, ownership and pride. People will have a greater level of buy-in to their work space, work responsibilities and overall organization.

Creating environments for success and prosperity is directly linked to how a leader conditions an environment to be conducive for the daily planting of success seeds and the regular harvest of achievement.

Is there a way to build a better mousetrap? Of course there is. If done, would anyone want to buy a better mousetrap or are people so complacent that they don’t really want to improve their performance?

Businesses have evolved into using very similar methods for immersing new players to a team and ensuring that all of the government mandates are met. This has detracted from real performance, however, causing it to become the third or fourth most important factor on the list of priorities.

One simple way to improve the performance of every player in an organization is to rebuild the application that one traditionally fills out when applying for a position. Convert this application that one would fill-out away from the traditional “Position Application” and to a “Performance Application” and share this new insight with everyone vested in these results – everyone should know the performance abilities of every player on a team. Once this knowledge is shared, everyone can be held accountable for drawing upon one another – in an appropriate strategic and tactical manner – for peak performance!

Cultivating performance greatness from the beginning can be drawn from the valuable information that one would give you if asked the right questions. Consider:

Work – All applicable previous work positions and additional questions as to how any of this data would be an added value to you and the present team. Allow them sell themselves and illustrate how they can impact the team, if allowed to join, by aiding it in increasing revenue, saving revenue and/or increasing productivity.

As a tactical leader, to cultivate peak performance and coach greater performance on a daily basis, you actually will not be drawing upon this information for someone to perform, but rather:

Practical Education – Solicit from individuals the last twenty or forty seminars, symposiums, home study courses completed or workshops they have attended. Ask them to recap how at least five to ten of these can be immediately drawn from for utilization in your environment. Solicit how these ongoing educational exposures can actually have more immediate and lasting positive performance impact upon you and the team than any traditional formal degree!

Certifications – Solicit the totality of any life certifications they have attained and ways others on your team could glean value from them. Inquire how those could be drawn upon and in what ways they could serve as the team’s subject matter expert in those domains, thus leading others’ performances to greatness!

Must Have – Also solicit on this performance application by category prompts all the necessary skill abilities a person must have to even rise to the state of peak performance in any specific functioning area. You know what people must have to be true performers and what the functionality traits are that one must possess to be successful; don’t keep those a secret. Rather, enter them into this application template.

In essence, consider expanding the traditional second data collection field of education into both the “Formal” and now the “Practical” educational requirements or ideal sought capabilities. Most organizations DO NOT COLLECT this data presently!

Once this data is collected, don’t keep it a secret. Broadcast these performance insights both horizontally within your business area and vertically to leaders to have as strategic access opportunities.

Performance success does not just happen. Success leaves clues, and the purpose of this “Performance Application” is solicit exactly that – performance showcase snapshots from the past that can be extrapolated for the future.